The most expensive trailer ever made. Setting up in the very last scene the character of Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), straight out of Peaky Blinders, and his gang, who, presumably, are the main characters of the sequel. And, for sure, they are a big improvement on the iodine-doused philosophy-spouting Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who has built the skull pillar used in all the advertising.
This is the kind of horror film that doesn’t just want to be another zombie picture. You can argue that the “infected” once killed do stay dead but they don’t appear to be aware that most of the time they rampage around just like zombies, so it’s a fairly moot point. Meanwhile, the director makes umpteen points about conservation in a Fisherman’s Friend type of village where the one thing, judging from the party scene, they are never going to run out of is home-made booze. Despite the conservation message, the survivors are happy to desecrate the forests for fuel.
You could have the written the plot on a pinhead. Young lad Spike (Alfie Williams) makes his bones killing an infected. Not that hard since it’s the size of a giant slug and can hardly move. The conservation message seems lost on young Spike since he burns some essential house to the ground to create a diversion, something so essential it’s going to make the guards guarding the causeway abandon their posts while he escapes the village.
And although, nearly three decades on from the original adventures in this saga, the world has changed – would you believe it, there’s such a thing as mobile phones and cosmetic surgery (information drop courtesy of a wandering shipwrecked Swedish sailor) – it seems that breast cancer was also unknown back in the day and Jamie’s addled mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is so addled that even in her moments of clarity hasn’t realized that those strange lumps all over her body are cancer.
Anyways, luckily, she’s an obliging soul and rather than put her son through the agony of watching her dying, she elects for assisted dying, courtesy of the good doctor. And boy that kid is some kid, and in the barmiest scene in the whole movie, goes along with the barmy notion that he let the doc chop off his mum’s head and boil up her skull so he (Spike, that is) can stick it atop the skull pyramid.
Did I mention there was a baby? My guess is Jodie Comer took the part on the basis of the scene where she bonds with the pregnant infected woman, helping her through her incredibly speedy labor, presumably speedy birth being an unknown side effect of infection.
Another side effect is that infected babies don’t cry, which is heck of a useful when you are trying to hide in the woods or the wilderness from the scavenging monsters, including the aptly-named Samson, who can tear heads (and attached spinal column) off with his bare hands and since he is permitted to survive my guess is he’s turn up again in the sequel.
The baby might even be some nod to virgin birth for all I know, the only child born uninfected. I only mention that because as well as the cod philosophy there’s a dose of cod spirituality, the Angel of the North statue brought into the equation for no apparent reason.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, at one point a contender for the vacant James Bond slot, does very little except roister and upset his son by indulging in a bit of adultery. It’s all very Robin Hood what with the emphasis on bow-and-arrow as the weapon of choice, and just to show how effective they are in case we’re not paying attention and seeing how easily they kill off the infected punters, every now and then director Danny Boyle chucks in a clip from I guess Henry V which shows how effective a hail of arrows can be, though anyone paying attention to any Ridley Scott historical picture would be aware of this.
There’s a note on immigration as well. Britain is quarantined, so no Brits can emigrate abroad, European patrol boats operating in the North Sea and presumably the English Channel to deter anyone setting off in a dinghy, the opposite of the current situation.
Waste of an otherwise talented cast – Jodie Comer (The Last Duel, 2021), Aaron Taylor- Johnson (Kraven the Hunter, 2024) and Alfie Williams in his big role debut.
Directed by Danny Boyle (Yesterday, 2019) and written by Alex Garland (Civil War, 2024) too determined to make points at the expense of going to the trouble of creating an involving story.
Complete absence of thrills, I’m afraid, and too much preaching.
The Magnificent 60s 